Month: May 2011

A defining feature of working at hagwon on an afternoon/evenings schedule:  walking home in the dark.

So far, it's been pretty unstructured.  My new job mostly has involved me being a substitute teacher for my overworked and stressed out fellow teachers.  That's OK.  It gives me a chance to get to know the students a little bit, and get a feel for how things work.  But there are all these snippets of familiarity, of course – unlike any "new" job I've ever had, before.  I know my boss, he's a friend.  I know all the other people who work there, from my many visits over the years.  And even some of the students know me – some were my students way back at LinguaForum, and there's even a refugee from LBridge's apocalyptic collapse. 

I was reflecting as I walked home tonight, that this business of coming back to a job in such a familiar context is, in itself, something new for me.  Normally, once I abandon a job and "move on," I never go back.  This business of circling back… well, I do it a lot in my travels, but almost never in my career.  Experiment. 

I woke up feeling congested and flu-ey. And then, looking at the local weather online, I saw why: 황사 [hwang-sa = yellow dust] – Seoul’s spring scourge, fresh from the Gobi Desert. See the cute, yellowish, disgusting cloud icon, at left?

The sky definitely has a yellowish cast to it. I closed my window.

Today is my first day of actual teaching, at my new job. I will have middle-schoolers – I haven’t taught middle schoolers since I was at LinguaForum, in 2008. I remember that my success with this age group was much less of a sure thing than with the elementary students – so I feel some anxiety, I suppose.